Opening .dat files

Is there a program that can open up .dat files? A program I have combines all of it's files into 1 large .dat file and I'd like to extract the files if I could. I thought I saw a program on here that could do something similar a few weeks ago but haven't had any luck finding it.

 

Halo, does the Index.dat program (your link below), work with all *.dat files, or only the Index.dat files?
*.dat is used by other programs, I think.
Can't remember which ones, offhand..
Gotta keep on taking the tablets. Bazza
PS: Just did a search on my PC, for *.dat. Lots more than I thought. Baz

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It opens any .dat file. I got a bunch of garbage when I tried to open my file. I'm trying to figure out how to extract stuff from it. It is a game file and I want to get some sounds out of it.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry it doesn't do what you want.
Although it may open any *.dat file, it may be written specifically for Index.dat content. Anyone else out there with other ideas? Bazza
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Dat files are created by many different programs, and they can be graphic, binary or text etc.

I doubt one program would/could open all of them, and it's usually only the parent program that can "de-cipher" them.

 

What game is it? Sometimes the .dat file may be another type of file. If that makes sense. I have seen some old games that renamed their extensions to some weird extension, but using any uncompressing tools typically opened the file. Does not work in all cases.

 

Guild Wars. When it updates or streams content from new areas it always says downloading X # of files. The only file that changes is Gw.dat, which increases in size. So I assume the files are either being appended to the current file or somehow grouped with them.

 

They could be using a number of techniques to grow the file including having a proprietary indexed binary stream and not individual files. However, I would guess that instead of reinventing the wheel they used a standard compression package.

I like WinRAR for file compression and it seems to do a good job of automatically reading the file headers, determining the compression type and openning files regardless of the file extension. Give it a try.